Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
politicians and others. Rather than during the Enlightenment, they place the
idea's beginnings in nineteenth century industrialization and the wide variety of
problems in adapting to industry in different countries, including many colonies.
These writers broaden the scope of enquiry about the origins, although they still
wish to find a formal and literary source, rather than a concern which is innate in
human interests.
Rather than an invention or a set of ideas with limited time relevance,
development for our purposes may be taken as an idea with continuous relevance
to societies throughout history. While it is accepted that the post-war era has seen
some special arguments about development, some of them deliberately skewed in
order to favour powerful nations in their attempts to legitimize their own
intervention in poor countries, there is an objective process which is observable
in many countries, irrespective of whether there is any intervention by others. In
part this process is technically led. As machines have been adopted, as huge
resources of power and raw materials have been tamed for humanity, and
especially as great increases in communications have taken place, more and more
people have become aware of societies beyond their direct cognizance, and this
has led to an awakening of interest in their own improvement. This awakening is
a driving force for development that it is hard to quench.
If we take a long view, there are also many counteroffensives against some of
the effects of development, so that it is possible to see the post-modernist view as
simply the latest attack on the development process. In the period since the first
Industrial Revolution, the protests have been more vociferous, and with good
reason in many cases. Robert Owen, for example, a manager for modern
development of textiles in Scotland, eventually rejected the damage done by the
social reorganization for factory work in Lanarkshire, and attempted to set up
new social structures on the Mid West frontier in the USA. Later in the century,
William Morris argued for a more holistic approach to life than was permitted by
the factory system of his time, and returned to pre-industrial models of craft
industry to put his ideas into practice. In the present century, the ideas of
Development from Below, or of “another development” (Hettne 1990), are more
sophisticated and more theoretically based ideas in the same vein. The most
positively oriented ideas come from writers who seek to help speciflc groups
such as rural dwellers, women, ethnic minorities, and the environment as a
special case of a minority; these have considerable relevance in checking the
market-related mainline theories. On the other hand, it is possible to detect in much
of the anti-development lobby a concern for the minority interest that actually
overlooks the main thrust of development. The focus of such writers as Escobar
(1995) in his general review, or detailed work such as that of Routledge (1993,
1995), picks out rural disadvantaged groups and privileges their position. At the
present time, it may be argued, the centre of development is not in the rural areas
nor in minority groups. There is instead an urban and industrial focus. In this
topic, development is also argued to be a highly concentrated affair, so that
